The next-generation learning management system shouldn’t be a system at all, but a "digital learning environment" where individual components -- from grade books to analytics to support for competency-based education -- fit together like Lego bricks, a new white paper recommends.
"The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment: A Report on Research," released last month, advances Educause's initiative to examine how faculty members and students feel about their learning management systems and what they want from them in the future. The effort, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is known as the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment Initiative.
Even though virtually all colleges and universities run some form of learning management system, many faculty members have a "love-hate relationship" with the software, Malcolm Brown, director of the Educause Learning Initiative, said in an interview. On the one hand, he pointed out, it's technology "you can't live without," but on the other, it’s a source of frustration and impatience for many.
Educause hoped to consider whether existing learning management systems can support higher education at a time when many colleges and universities are experimenting with new forms of delivering courses and awarding credit. Instead of focusing on "incremental change," the researchers decided to articulate what a re-envisioning of the market would look like, Brown said.
The white paper combines Educause's own research with input from learning management system providers, accessibility and universal design experts, IT officials, university leaders, and others. Authors Malcolm Brown, Joanne Dehoney and Nancy Millichap then synthesized those opinions into one overarching recommendation: that commercial providers, open-source communities and individual developers settle on a set of specifications to make different software work together -- in other words, the studs and cylinders that make Lego bricks interlock.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/11/educause-releases-blueprint-next-generation-learning-management-systems